Daud Bolad

In the early 1970s, Bolad was nominated by the Islamist National Islamic Front to be the president of the Khartoum University Students Union (KUSU).

The position was seen as placing Bolad on the fast track to national political leadership as part of the 'western strategy' of Hassan al Turabi to gain the votes of Darfur and Kurdufan.

[2] Frustrated and disillusioned, Bolad went to Chad in 1989 seeking the support of President Hissène Habré in starting a rebel movement in Darfur, but was rejected.

He then went to Ethiopia to meet John Garang, leader of the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), which had been prosecuting the Second Sudanese Civil War in the south since 1983.

[4] The given reason for the expedition was to spark a Darfuri guerilla movement and spread the civil war to the west, as had been done in the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile.

SPLA-Torit (the faction led by Garang) was thus fully engaged in fighting SPLA-Nasir in the south and could not send help to Bolad's force once it ran into difficulty.

[8] The force intended to reach sanctuary in the Marrah Mountains but had to cross an arid expanse controlled by Baggara Arabs in the dry season, in which the only sources of water were the village boreholes that were both few and well-known.

[6] With the failure of Bolad's insurrection and the coming to power of Idriss Déby in Chad, and resulting lowering of Libyan involvement in the region, much of Darfur subsided into a state of generalized insecurity that never reached the status of actual peace.